October 11, 2017

Western Wednesday 32

The four pack of Westerns I watched today came from Platinum Disc Corporation and they put four different Westerns on a single disc. The series is called The Great American Western and it's the 11th volume of 30.

Battle Of Chief Pontiac 1962 It's directed by Felix E Feist with a script by Jack DeWitt. Lon Chaney Jr plays Chief Pontiac and Lex Barker is a soldier who goes against the Hessian Colonel who is in favor of killing the natives outright. It's pretty heavy handed but the bitter sweet ending is good. About average for the story. There's a nice score by Elmer Bernstein.

Sitting Bull 1954 Dale Robertson is a Major in the Army, he disagrees with General Custer and sides with Sitting Bull. J Carrol Naish plays Sitting Bull and Iron Eyes Cody plays Crazy Horse. He gets tried and convicted of treason for helping the Indians. Don't worry he'll be saved when Sitting Bull comes to his rescue in a pretty unbelievable scene. Jack DeWitt wrote the screenplay to this movie, he co-wrote the script with director Sidney Salkow.

Against A Crooked Sky 1975 Richard Boone plays a prospector who helps a young man find the Indian tribe that stole his sister. They find her just as she's doomed to die int he morning. The brother has a certain amount of time to beat the sun so he can die in his sisters place. He fails and the sister is shot with an arrow and falls off a cliff. In a kind of bogus made for TV ending she's alive. The daughter of the chief took her place under the strategically placed blanket and fell off the cliff with an arrow in her. The Indian brave who took the sister returns her to the family. It was mostly below average with hardly anything happening for long stretches. Richard Boone was noisy.

The Great Indian Wars is a 1991 documentary that was pretty poorly produced. They use clips from public domain Westerns and re-use them several times in the 96 minute running time. The narration is kind of dull on top of that. I started speeding up after a while. From what I see the documentary I saw is edited from a longer 5 part series. You can see the 3 hour and 40 minute version on YouTube. It looks like a lot of the interviews, and other interesting stuff, was cut out and the narration changed. After watching bits and pieces from the same era it turns out to be a more interesting documentary. I'll download it and get to it in the future.